Love it! This very thread proves why Mike rocks: he has y'all talking and reading his stuff. Check that: he has y'all talking about him
Say what you will about specifics, but he is a great markerter, no doubt, and we could all learn a thing or fifty from the man.
IMHO, he is almost 100% right (see below for the tiny caveat). SEO is a simple, three part process:
1. Build a site SE spiders can crawl, that uses straight <a href=""> links.
2. Write lots of content that uses terms people search for as relevant.
3. Get links from other sites.
That is it, the whole ball and dice. Now, sure, it gets complicated on occasion, but that is usually as a result of people getting those three points wrong, and needing to fix them, not because the concepts are terrible challenging.
IMHO, if SEO is rocket science, then fly me to the moon, Chimpanzees, cause you ave the brain power.
Marketing is what it is all about, and when Mike said "We become true marketers or die, that's what" he was 100%, unequivocally correct.
Story time. I had a woman harangue me about what SEO is at this industry do tother day. Turns out she was a "standards advocate". "How are they different", she kept saying, claiming that a well marked up site is what search engines like. After trying to placate her for a while with "they share a lot in common", I finally had enough and gave her a rant back.
The difference between SEO and all the coding things it is similar to, such as accessibility, standards etc is simple: the goals are different. A well marked up site is the goal of standards. Who cares if it makes money. That isn't the coders job. Who cares if it attracts search visits. That isn't the coders job. All that matters is that it comforms to certain rules.
That is why SEO exists, or at least began, to bridge the gap between code monkeys and wankers in suits that say things like "core demographic" and use tech buzzwords not out of an understanding of the technology (and its limitations), but in a vain attempt to sound knowledgable (hae a read of the boo.com fiasco
, a fantastic read, for a timely reminder of why such people are so painful).
As coders get better at building SE friendly sites, and marketers begin to learn how to write SE friendly content, where will that leave SEOs? IMHO, there will always be terrible sites that need help, but these sorts of easy gigs won't last, and the best SEOs will either become, and here Mike and I agree, marketers or, and here is that tiny caveat, code monkeys who build SE friendly sites. In other words, either SEOs evolve to use search to achieve a business's higher goals, in the context of a marketing plan, or they will just build sites so that others can come in and do that themselves.
As a wrap up, I think examples can really paint a good picture. An example of what I believe is a great use of SEO as a marketing tool beyond simple, textbook SEO, read these two
by Ammon (aka black knight), and see how SEO can be a marketing tool, rather than just a paint by numbers exercise. I am guessing here, but I would say these are great examples of exactly the sort of thing that Mike Grehan advocates.